“Jesus the Sinner”

I've been contemplating this post for about a day and a half. Not too long, but long enough to realize I really do want to post it. You may know where I want to take this post, but hopefully not completely.

My brother Ryan gave me a text he was reading for one of his classes at Duke Div school, Transforming Atonement: A Political Theology of the Cross, by Theodore W. Jennings Jr. He gave me this book for my birthday back in April, but didn't have time to really dive into it. I read the intro and first chapter, but that was it. Looking at my class schedule this semester, I realized I'd be discussing atonement so I decided it'd be a good time to pick it up. Now, this post isn't explicitly about Christ's atoning activity, but the text discusses Jesus as a "sinner." (Those are my words) Perhaps this is not the most revolutionary statement about Jesus, indeed I imagine that Jesus' contemporaries would have said it right to his face.

In his third chapter, "Cross and Division," Jennings discusses activity that would have given Jesus (and Paul in a similar vein) the identity of a sinner. Lets be serious now, he hung out with some sketchy folks! Adulteress women, tax collectors, whores, prostitutes, and the list goes on! Who wouldn't think Jesus was a sinner? He didn't obey the Torah, he healed on the Sabbath; he shared meals and stayed the night with the dregs of society. How on earth could one call him 'teacher?' This is not only limited to Jesus, but also his followers, especially Paul. "Paul acts as a traitor to his own ethnic, cultural, and religious privilege in order to be in solidarity with the outsiders, just as Christ, especially the crucified Christ, was in solidarity with the outsider, the despised, the excluded, the profane, and the godforsaken." (Jennings, 73)

Let's get this straight, Jesus (and those would follow after him) is labeled as a "sinner" by his contemporaries for his association with the outsider. We might think that this is ridiculous, but how different are we than Jesus contemporaries? How would we react to someone walking out of a drag bar with a group of people at 3AM? What would we think of someone who dined with an owner of a Check Into Cash or Payday Loans? Do we really think of the "cross of Jesus as entailing the abolition of the distinction between the chosen people and all others?" (72)

This is dirty, and I imagine that if we were to hang out with these members of society we too would be labeled as "sinners." What if the church spent a good portion of our time with the homosexual community? What if we grabbed some coffee with strippers after their shift? I'm not saying that we go hang out with others as some sort of mission trip or witness organization. What if we went just to BE with them, what if we really really enjoyed their company? (It should be noted that of all Jesus' encounters with the dregs of society he only tells the woman caught in adultery about to be stoned to stop sinning. Everyone else he demands no repentance.) How would the "in" crowd respond?

Maybe this isn't the best post I've had, maybe I'm being intentionally "inflammatory," and maybe the title was just to get you to read this… But maybe, just maybe, Jesus' death (not as a Judean, not as a member of the "in" crown, but death as a bandit, death as an outsider, death according to the Roman, not Jewish courts) is literal solidarity with these people. If he asks that, if we choose to follow him, we also carry our cross; carry our cross as a non-member, an outsider, a dreg.

 

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